Finally, a little work-sanctioned blogging: I'm a blogger-at-large (of sorts) at the Walker Art Center's blogs. So far, the Film/Video; Education and Community Programs; and Performing Arts departments are blogging. Look for my posts—and those of some pretty interesting minds in a variety of areas—there. Here's my first post, on the film blog:

Downloading nightmares: In the "war on terror," it's pretty easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys, right? The BBC's documentary series The Power of Nightmares, produced last fall, suggests it's not so easy. The film looks at two groups, American neo-conservatives and radical Islamists, arguing that the notion that we're "threatened by a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion... a myth that has spread unquestioned through politics, the security services and the international media." Here's a plot summary from the TimesOnline:

[Writer/narrator Adam] Curtis’s argument is so neatly structured that you don’t want anything to threaten its symmetry. It goes like this: Washington’s neoconservatives, who had President Reagan’s ear and now have George W. Bush’s, start scouring the world for a new ideologically flawed, power-hungry bogeyman following the demise of the Soviet bear; and they find an ally for their despair of incontinent liberalism in America’s Christian fundamentalists. At the very same time, various Islamic fundamentalists, repulsed by Egypt’s slide into secularism, resolve to restore Islam to its rightful place as the religious, political and cultural backbone of the Middle East.

Winner of a 2004 British Academy Television Award, the documentary has apparently never been shown in the US.

'Til now: the amazing, nonprofit Internet Archive is offering The Power of Nightmares as a free download.

Wayback lawsuit: The 10-year old Internet Archive, which also runs the Wayback Machine, a site where you can search an archive of 40 billion web pages as they appeared when first published, is getting sued. A company called Healthcare Advocates has filed suit against the organization "saying the access to its old Web pages, stored in the Internet Archive's database, was unauthorized and illegal."